Bonds and Becks

Its been a prolific two days for me at the Hubdub Blog.

With two posts in two days, one arguing for the return of a baseball drug cheat and another deriding the likelihood of Englands golden boy winning his 100th cap, I may yet become a great sports controversialist!

Be my friend on Hubdub (and marvel!)

Alas, while my sojourn amidst the summit of the Hubdub leaderboard towards the end of January was brief, it did result in this blog‘s best days in terms of traffic (more than 10!).

Of course, the briefness of my time at the top has nothing to do with diminished or relatively inferior predictive capabilities on my part. It is entirely due to the embargo on me making predictions in the sports category which falls under my jurisdiction and the channeling of my efforts towards making this category the best one on Hubdub (colleagues – forgive my vanity).

I am after all quite the bright spark and my powers of prediction ought to be (instead of are) legendary.

Now that Hubdub has introduced friend leaderboards, I feel compelled to re-assert and demonstrate these mighty powers.

So if the cynical amongst you (reading via Facebook) want to challenge such assertions, or if you agree entirely with me and want to marvel at my (criswellian) ability to predict the future course of world events; then do add me as a friend on Hubdub (join if you haven’t already) and cower beneath me on your respective leaderboards!

I’ll try not to get a nose-bleed!

COYS!

Its about glory!

Hubdub Blog Post

I just posted this today on the Hubdub blog. It briefly discusses the coverage of the NFL Draft on prediction markets and why Hubdub will be a great way of following and predicting the outcome(s) of the Draft.

Can’t think of a Smith’s lyric for this..

As someone who occasionally attempts to intersperse Smiths lyrics into everyday conversation, seeing Morrissey for the first time in the Edinburgh Playhouse last night was quite exciting.

The gig was very very very good; brilliant even.

But I’ll stop short of describing it as transcendently amazing or amazingly transcendent as I felt it lost momentum towards the middle of Moz’s  set-list.

Also, the support band, Girl in a Coma weren’t exactly the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester in 1976. But someone did insightfully point out to me that perhaps they were or could be, in an antonymic manner.

So….if I ever become a hugely influential and platinum selling recording artist, I’ll be sure to cite Girl in a Coma at the Edinburgh Playhouse in 2008 as my inspiration.

Hubdub!

In addition to being an MSc student, I am now working as the Sports Editor for Hubdub Ltd, an Edinburgh based startup that combines news aggregation and prediction markets to create what we call (drumroll)…the world’s news forecaster.

The site went into public beta today, coinciding with the company’s attendance at DEMO 2008 this week.

So far the publicity has been fairly good. The launch has been covered by TechCrunch and an AP article has been doing the rounds.

The Gregg Williams/Washington Redskins question referred to in the above report is my creation along with most of the other American sports markets (although my position as the dominant sports market maker will dwindle with the huge spike in users that is occuring)

I’m pretty excited about this. For quite some time, I’ve been interested in markets; especially exchange markets such as Betfair (ever since I discovered the intraday FTSE markets). Although this doesn’t involve exchange markets with real money, the combination of news aggregation and prediction markets is unique and interesting and will hopefully contribute to something that is fun and serves as a point of reference for others.

(now that the sales pitch is over) We’ll see

A “bright spark”

I should have mentioned this sooner, but I was recently described as a “bright spark” by the Evening Echo; Ireland’s greatest and most prestigious newspaper (ahem).

This description appeared in a December article; covering the BIS graduation breakfast, which occurred last September.

While the timeliness of the article and this blog posting is suspect; there can be no questioning the aptness of the description in question!

Just some shameless self promotion. Narcissism..????………me!!?!

Nostalgia

For anyone that misses the old photo, or is curious to know what it looked like:

It will stand as a permanent commemeration of the genesis of donalmulvihill.com

Yes, this is donalmulvihill(.wordpress).com

After owning the domain name for over a year, at a cost of about $20 (the first $10 were paid when the mighty greenback was actually worth something), I have decided that its about time I done something with donalmulvihill.com beyond merely displaying a rather bizarre picture of yours truly (The bizarreness of that picture may be attributed to the incredibly cheap digital camera used and the unique lighting I had in the front room of my home in da collig).

What I’m not doing however is paying for hosting…….so its wordpress for now.

Now lets see how long it takes me to write a second entry……I will try.